Ask HN: Why do I find it so difficult to learn to code?

I have been trying to learn how to code using numerous languages for the past 10 years. I go over the same stuff, strings, variables, arrays etc and I possibly get about 100 pages through a book, everything feels great, I'm understanding what I read and I do the examples. For some reason, out of the blue I hit a brick wall and suddenly I feel overwhelmed and stressed, I look at other people's code and it's as if I'm reading Chinese. I get dishearted and eventually stop. After a few weeks/months I repeat the entire process. I've used several languages over the years so I know it's not the language. Is it something I'm destined not to do or could I be doing something wrong?

Can somebody PLEASE help me overcome this problem as I want to code more than anything.

Thanks

Start without looking at other people's code. Think of simple projects you could do, and do them from scratch. Even highly experienced contractors have a difficult time going over other large projects if they are not familiar with the code.

Don't try to make everything perfect from the first time. Make it work, then you can improve it.

Build a simple tool first, such as a video converter or a timesheet management tool or even the classic blog, calculator, image gallery etc.

You will hit not one, but many brick walls, you just need to know how to find a way to go over them. If the problems you are trying to solve when you hit the brick wall are too complex, divide them into smaller things you can tackle independently.

While you are doing this, keep on reading about programming as well as secondary processes that can make your life easier.

And finally, use an IDE, not notepad, learn to do TDD and how to use a profiler. You'll save yourself a lot of time.

I hope this helps you.

I don't know, I can only tell you what worked for me. It was "just doing it", without worying about style, guidelines, whether this will scale, is this the best practice, I just wanted to do something, I wrote the code that was the least resistance path to achieve it (I wrote 5x5 word guessing game in TurboBasic - I didn't knew how procedures worked, I did not knew that there was while loop, so i wrote one for nested into other for with the bigges numbers I could put there and worked, it was basically one big loop with if for each case, and a few variables. I should be ashamed of this code, but I was proud, because it worked. It was magic. I've shown it to my friends and parents, and everybody, and I felt so great.

I've tried something harder next time. And I've found about arrays - so I don't have to name my variables X1, x2, x3, x4 and check them with ifs, so I used arrays, then I found out about procedures, etc, etc. Then I used that to write next simple logic game, and so it went.

Whe you have something that works, it's easier to see why you need arrays, or functions, or loop without counter :) And it gives you motivation.

Anyway - good luck.

Let's talk about Chinese.

Can you "learn" Mandarin by reading a few books on Mandarin, taking a few courses, attempting to read some books in Mandarin, and occasionally speaking a few words to that cute Chinese girl at work?

Yes, you can "learn" Mandarin that way, but you can't Learn it.

If you were REALLY passionate about learning Mandarin, you would have to go to China (or at least Chinatown) and stay a while. Then you would be driven to learn Mandarin because you would need huge chunks of it for very real things. NOT learning Mandarin would be more painful than learning it.

You need a project. You need a project complex enough that you need huge chunks of programming knowledge to implement functionality. You need a project so interesting to you that it's more painful NOT to learn how to program than it would be to learn.

UPDATE: One other thing. It's ALWAYS difficult to read other people's code. Always. This gets easier, but complex codebases always look like gobbledygook the first time you look at it. I've been programming for 20 years and this still happens to me. You get used to it. What's the strategy? How do you eat an elephant?

Not everyone can explain their yearnings. Some want to fly planes, or play guitar, or climb mountains. It's just innate.